


you used to exist only in my dreams

by harajukucrepes



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe: Set in New York, Because this is me there's porn somewhere in there, Episodic prose, Housemates and Found Families, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Linear Narrative, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, Stream of Consciousness, This has a Sitcom-ish style to it i think, Very very very slow burn because this fic spans at least ten years, because this is also me the language gets pretty vulgar somewhere, but this is a very sweet and happy fic and people get together, this is the happiest fic i've ever written i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:08:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25088179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/harajukucrepes/pseuds/harajukucrepes
Summary: Yuta says that it didn’t hit him like a big tidal wave when the epiphany struck.*or, a housemates au fic set in brooklyn, nyc, where i ramble on and on and on and on and on and on about yujae being in love
Relationships: Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun & Suh Youngho | Johnny, Jung Yoonoh | Jaehyun/Nakamoto Yuta, Mark Lee & Nakamoto Yuta, Mark Lee & Suh Youngho | Johnny, Nakamoto Yuta & Suh Youngho | Johnny, Yumark is platonic but Jaehyun talked about them a lot
Comments: 22
Kudos: 65





	you used to exist only in my dreams

**Author's Note:**

> \- the top excerpt in this fic was from a draft i wrote for a yuri on ice fic that i didn't get to finish, the idea came to me as i swam through my unfinished drafts and found this and thought it would work as a yujae fic so i self-plagiarised it i suppose  
> \- most of this fic weren't planned beforehand because i was desperate to write something happy to compensate for the emotional damage i went through as i wrote [Minutes to Midnight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24597949)  
> \- maybe to also compensate for people i traumatised with that fic so please accept this apology  
> \- i should state that Scotia Street is a real place (in New Zealand) and so is Angela Avenue (in Coventry, United Kingdoms)  
> \- i have never been to the US and have never been in New York, so for any New Yorkers reading this and finding this an absolutely garbage kind of portrayal...please forgive me. i tried :/ 
> 
> \- i promise this is an ACTUAL happy fic, no sad or open endings  
> \- i ramble a lot so please also forgive me  
> \- thank you so much, any feedbacks are welcomed and feel free to let me know if there's any mistakes

*

you used to exist only in my dreams

*

  
  
  
  
  


(i) 

  
  
  
  
  


A vinyl record of Frank Ocean, a leather sofa, a vintage car plate—and now, a polaroid.

I love it, Jaehyun whispers softly, his fingertips gently tucking Yuta’s hair behind his ear.

I really love this picture of us. You look like you were proud of me. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Yuta says that it didn’t hit him like a big tidal wave when the epiphany struck. 

“I was just watching you,” he admits, “and there it was.”

He says it in such a Yuta way of saying things, so gentle and so heartfelt and so delicate like his words are gradually undulating in the velvety vibrations of his voice that Jaehyun can’t help but to look at him a little more and watch the way his face says things his lips couldn’t. The way his gaze shifts away as he sees Jaehyun laying his eyes on him, his senses heighten up as his awareness increases, his whole body curls inwards as if to wrap himself within a defensive bubble that is all but familiar yet strange to him.

“So,” Yuta steals a glance from beneath his pretty, long eyelashes and says coyly, “what do you think?”

And there it is, Jaehyun thinks, watching Yuta’s paint-stained fingers gripping hard at his brush and trembling slightly to prepare himself for the possible catastrophe. 

The epiphany that hits him like a big tidal wave. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


The thing that possessed most of his headspace when he had first arrived at the apartment in Brooklyn’s Scotia Street with his gigantic luggage was the puzzle of whether Mark and Yuta were together, as in _together._

Jaehyun got to know Mark as his mother’s cousin’s acquaintance’s penpal’s son—which in their community pretty much meant he was as good as family—and he was the one who had reached out to offer him a place in the apartment he had been staying in. He still had two years left in his three-year lease and the only other occupant in his apartment was this Japanese guy—a full-time artist but a part-time bartender and an occasional freelancer—and Mark was totally confident that they would get along well. Jaehyun accepted his offer right away because Mark happened to be the only guy he knew who would send him a text to tell him that he had sent him an email just to tell him (with grotesque amount of detail) that he would be welcomed in his humble little crib in downtown Brooklyn and if he would please take extra care in navigating around because apparently the street itself was pretty obscure that plenty of his friends had some difficulties locating and also, finally, he was going to mail a letter to his home in Massachusetts from his address so that Jaehyun would be able to have the address on hand. 

And so, by the time Jaehyun had arrived in New York, with his possessions unceremoniously dragged around all the way from the Grand Central Terminal with him, he had received enough information from Mark to be able to successfully reach Scotia Street without much trouble at all and yet all the ease Mark had provided him with failed to tell him one very crucial fact that was key to fully secure his reputation as the master of first impressions—

—because the Japanese guy living with him was absolutely, indisputably, astonishing, heart-stoppingly, and breathtakingly _gorgeous._

His beauty shocked Jaehyun so much that for a moment, he almost considered asking if Mark was running some (dodgy ass) talent agency before proceeding to make a humongous fool out of himself by accidentally dropping his luggage on his toes when he saw him opening the door and let out the most undignified-sounding scream he had ever heard coming out from his own throat and so, as far as first impressions went, that ended up being one of the worst and he didn’t blame the gorgeous Japanese guy at all for avoiding his direct gazes in those first few months he had started living with them. 

Mark though, bless his innocent gullible little soul, seemed to have not noticed the subtle and constricted awkwardness going on between his existing housemate and his new housemate and assumed that the lack of interaction was just because of language barrier. Jaehyun, however, frequently came close to telling Mark the truth about feeling like his longtime housemate didn’t really welcome his presence, but he couldn't find it in him to interrupt Mark’s earnest and lengthy jabbers about his unnecessarily pretty housemate and that was how Jaehyun got to know so many things about Yuta even before having exchanged a word with him, with some key facts being: he was four years older than Mark so that made him about two years older than Jaehyun; he had only been in New York a few years ago after graduating high school in Japan which explained his adorable accent; despite introducing himself as a painter and expressing his aspirations through his canvases, he could never seem to choose between his art and his photography; he loved to sing while painting and he loved those really melodic J-rock ballads; and most fascinatingly, in Jaehyun’s opinion, for a person who worked part time making drinks at a bar, he allegedly couldn’t hold his own, alcohol-wise. 

Even though Jaehyun did sometimes shuffle internally between wanting to ask Mark about the true nature about his relationship with his housemate and minding his own business (which was an unexpectedly hard thing to do, considering that lack of clarity only made him more obsessed with them), he later came to realise that despite the first impression and the many ways their relationship could be misconstrued—especially with the way Mark regularly let Yuta cuddle with him while watching movies, sometimes tucking Yuta to sleep after he unknowingly dozed off next to a half-painted canvas, also when Mark bought him his favourite brand of cup noodles and Yuta blew him a kiss in gratitude—he was certain that they were strictly platonic in ways he couldn’t explain. 

It was the kind of thing that hit him like a punch in the face once he managed to see it—that thin, invisible border that caged them comfortably outside the boundaries of romance and lust—but it wasn’t the thing that gave him the courage to acknowledge that something more than just a friendly interest towards Yuta was bubbling inside him. 

It was something a lot simpler. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Technically speaking, the first time Yuta ever said anything to Jaehyun to his face was when they were both reaching for the toilet and Yuta accidentally bumped into his shoulder and mindlessly muttered “sorry” before grabbing the knob then quickly slamming the door and shouting over the sound of him relieving himself. 

“You’re going to make it smell,” he was saying, “so let me use it first for a quick one.” 

Jaehyun’s morning mind was stuck battling to crawl out of sleepiness and wasn’t able to decipher this strange encounter effectively while anxiously holding himself in, so it was only after Yuta came out of the toilet with a visibly refreshed face but rapidly reddening cheeks that he noticed that Yuta had quite possibly mistaken him for Mark earlier and it would only be after he disembarked from the subway to work that he noticed that he had gulped down the bigger portion of the omelette that Mark had hastily prepared that day before running out to cover a petition in front of the White House over in D.C. 

It was kind of adorable, Jaehyun thought, how Yuta managed to say so much without really speaking to him directly because instead of apologising for shoving him aside and wrongly accusing him for making the toilet stink (not that he never made it smell, but Mark could sometimes be, well, causing a little more than just sensory overload), he was letting Jaehyun eat a little more to probably compensate for the energy he had used to hold himself in while waiting for Yuta outside the toilet. 

When he chuckled to himself in the office as he mentally unravelled Yuta’s possible thought process, his seatmate, John asked if he had a crush on someone. 

The technically correct answer at that time would be a straight, simple _no_ , but he chose to shrug it off and let the rumour mill run wild. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Throughout the years, Yuta had always been adamant that Jaehyun would never have to get him anything for Valentine’s and even though Jaehyun had always hated the way people make a big deal out of his birthday coinciding with this unwelcomed and yet universally-accepted romantic convention, he made an exception for Yuta because _Yuta_ making a big deal out of him being a Valentine Boy was what got him to finally speak to him properly. 

Jaehyun still recalls it fondly, the Valentine’s eve night when he was out in the balcony smoking while studying the New York skyline, doing some thinking about nothing in particular and Yuta snuck next to him and asked if it was real, that his birthday was indeed on the 14th of February. 

“Wanna see my ID?” Jaehyun asked but then he saw the lines on Yuta’s face tensing up and changed his tone. “I wasn’t challenging you, it’s just something I say to joke around because I kind of get that a lot.” 

Jaehyun then offered him a whiff of the cigarette he wasn’t exactly smoking as an offering to maybe put everything behind them and push a reset button, but Yuta declined with a small handwave. “There was a girl in my school back in Japan whose birthday was on Christmas,” he said, “and she hated it.” 

“Oh?”

“She said that it’s because other people get two presents a year at least, you know, on their birthdays and during Christmas, but she would only get one,” Yuta explained. “Plus because it was always Christmas first and her birthday second, so even though her family told her that she was a special Christmas Baby, she grew to resent it I suppose.” 

Jaehyun could only assume it was a true story from him, because while he did empathise with the Christmas girl from Yuta’s story, he also wanted to add that being born on Valentines also came with this unfortunate assumption that he was unusually eligible for any and every kind of romantic attention. At least being born on Christmas gives you some sort of legitimacy to claim yourself as Jesus, he was going to say, but he wasn’t sure if he should because after all, he really did feel like he should properly bond with his housemate without sounding like he was bitter about being practically ignored for months. 

“I thought she probably felt a bit lonely,” Yuta said, quite possibly throwing all credibilities of his story down towards the ground from the floor where they were, because Jaehyun was now seeing the point of the anecdote. 

“Luckily for me, I actually love the fact that I was born on Valentine’s day,” Jaehyun held up his can of beer in a toasting gesture in an attempt to both appreciate Yuta’s effort to bridge their awkwardness by finding a common ground and dismiss the notion that he might prefer staying a distance from him. “Because I always get double the amount of chocolates.” 

“Yeah, I thought you would,” Yuta remarked, suddenly becoming really interested in peeling off a rust on the balcony railing near his fingers. “Because well.” 

Then there was an explosion of fireworks in the sky that they somewhat accidentally ended up watching together and just as the last of the sparks started fading, Yuta mumbled something that to this day still sounds clear in Jaehyun’s mind as though he is just hearing it for the first time. 

_Happy Birthday._

  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


In a community as close-knit as theirs, Jaehyun should have known better than to assume that John, his fellow colleague who had been really helpful in regards to getting him settled down to the working life in New York, was someone he could keep as a safe distance from his housemates because after all, Mark the junior writer at The New Yorker and Yuta the socially reclusive artist hardly had any possibilities of intersecting with John Suh the Wall Street corporate trainee. 

But as fate would have it, John and Mark were apparently very close, like _really_ close. Mark said he owed John a lot because besides having helped him around with leasing the apartment in Scotia Street, he also happened to be a friend of Mark’s brother’s college mate’s cousin—which pretty much meant that they were _the bro-est of bros_ —and that relation allegedly gave John a free pass to endlessly tease Mark like he was a little brother he never had. Mark too, bless his good sporty soul, good-naturedly allow John to make fun of him so much that the chaos that usually ensued often made Jaehyun forget how serious Mark could be sometimes especially when he couldn’t write something that satisfied his own ridiculously high standard of literary excellence or journalistic integrity. 

Unlike John and Mark or Mark and Jaehyun who got close largely by merits of referral, Yuta was actually someone that Mark made an effort to get close to when he was an intern doing a piece on the Asian American art scene in NYC (not that Yuta was an American by any definition, but Mark had stretched the parameters a little for the sake of inclusiveness) and grew to admire his artistic soul piece by piece while watching him paint and observing the way he lived his life. 

At that point of time Jaehyun told himself that he really should just give up being preoccupied with the evolution of Mark and Yuta’s relationship and just accept that they really never went beyond platonic and that they also weren’t meant for anything more, but the fact that Mark and Yuta felt like a set of stars that aligned perfectly except in parallel never managed to escape his mind until much later, because he knew that if he were given a choice to live in Mark’s shoes as a journalist doing a story that somehow starred Yuta, he wouldn’t have let go of the chance to experience a fate that leads towards the cultivation of a perfectly healthy romance with someone like him. 

Jaehyun still wishes that he had known earlier about it being a silly obsession that led to nothing in particular except consuming a large part of his headspace that would have been better off spent at being more aware of his surroundings, because while he was too busy being in denial about being jealous of Mark, someone else in the house who wasn't Mark had been busy in denial about being attracted to him. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


(ii)

  
  
  
  
  


A vinyl record of Frank Ocean, a leather sofa—and now, a vintage car plate. 

For when we have our road trip later, Yuta says bashfully. It’s the first thing he ever gave to Jaehyun that comes with a request for an exchange. 

Jaehyun takes his hand in his and stealthily links their pinkies together. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Yuta once lamented to him that because they had their first real kiss in the middle of a snowy night on Christmas eve, he would never be able to paint bright colours onto anything that was supposed to convey romantic love. 

“It was all your fault,” he had said petulantly when they were playfully wrestling each other on the sofa after Jaehyun teased him about being so distracted by him that he couldn’t finish a commission for a client who was asking him to paint something as a tribute for his recently deceased wife. The client’s wife was a botanist, an embroidery enthusiast and also a distant friend of Yuta’s mother and Yuta was really trying his best to evoke the necessary melancholic sentimentalism that he got from the photo albums sent to him to give him ideas. 

If the stakes were a little lower, Jaehyun would have kept teasing him but then when his mind started trying to be useful by conjuring images of flowers, all he could think about were all the google stock images of lavender fields which was probably the least helpful of all the things. Yuta seemed to have sensed his contemplative mood, so he let out a small giggle before allowing his head to fall on Jaehyun’s chest, ear firmly pressed on top of where his heart was. 

“I’m just kidding,” he said softly before taking Jaehyun’s hand in his and inadvertently rubbing dried paint onto his palm. “I still have time, so I’ll just have to try a little harder.”

Jaehyun knew that he was just trying to make him feel better, but he gave a noncommittal mumble nonetheless and kissed the top of his head. 

For the next few days, Jaehyun would sometimes steal some time during his toilet breaks to search for florists around NYC and have his bouquets of choice delivered back to their shared apartment, each day with different colours just so that Yuta would be able to use a real specimen to hopefully inspire his artistic funk. 

On Monday, he got Yuta a bouquet of red roses, the most notably and conventionally “romantic” of them all and Mark texted him frantically after the delivery guy arrived to tell him that Yuta was in a state of panic and wailed that he wasn’t ready to be proposed to. Jaehyun laughed so hard that John had to shush him to remind him that the department a few aisle away was having a serious post mortem meeting. 

_No, I’m not proposing to him (yet)._ He texted Mark back. _Tell him to not worry._

(In retrospect, this was probably how Jaehyun should have known that Yuta wouldn’t appreciate an ambush-style proposal and so he should have always ensured that he left an obvious trail of hints of his intentions.)

On Tuesday, he sent him a custom bouquet with cool-coloured flowers (the website put the flowers’ names as limonium and delphinium, both which he had never heard before) that was apparently perfect for friendship. He had meant for the soft blue to contrast heavily with the intense red the day before and Yuta sent him a picture of himself smelling the bouquet the moment he received it. 

For Wednesday, it was a small vase of sunflowers. On Thursday, it was a more complex kind of custom bouquet with mostly warm-coloured flowers including roses, snapdragons and carnations and on Friday, he sent him a bouquet of beautiful pink peonies and judging from the barrage of instagram pictures he posted of the bouquet, it seemed like this was his favourite. 

On Saturday morning, Yuta squeezed himself inside his blanket and made himself comfortable in his arms to wake him and tell him that he had finally finished the painting so would he please, _please_ wake up now to have a look at it because he barely slept for the last few days and if he made himself any more comfortable while Jaehyun snoozed, he would really fall into a week-long hibernation. 

Jaehyun, who had been working overtime for a planning for a migration project, was separately having a war with his own fatigue and ended up just murmuring his refusal to wake up and so they both ended up continuing to sleep in that small queen-sized bed until the afternoon rays glared at him and he finally remembered that Yuta said something to him in the morning. In a haste, he almost wanted to wake Yuta up by shaking him and then decided against it because Yuta’s open-mouthed slumber was too adorable that it felt like a cardinal sin to disturb him, so he thought that he should let him sleep until he would wake up eventually, then got out of his room to head to the living room where Yuta had been using a huge part of it as his sort-of art studio and was greeted by a canvas painting of the side view of a woman wearing a white-brimmed hat embroidering dried peonies and surrounded by the dried petals of all the flowers Jaehyun had sent to him and more that he assumed Yuta had supplemented by his own. 

It was a groundbreaking work—combining the subject with her favourite past-times of embroidery and her lifelong passion in flowers and the artist’s experience of love and Jaehyun had never felt prouder. 

When Yuta woke up later, he went to great lengths to describe how he was almost pulling his hair in frustration and wanted to cut it short (much to Jaehyun’s horror) by the time he received the sunflowers because all the bouquets were doing the opposite of inspiring by literally distracting him since he got preoccupied with photographing them before they would wilt and that was how he got his idea to make the subject of the painting embroider the real petals. 

Jaehyun could only smile as he watched Yuta celebrate his achievement and his client’s satisfaction (according to Yuta’s mother, the client was so moved by the evocativeness of the artwork that he broke down in tears), waiting for the right time to break it to Yuta that the real genius of his work was probably not the way that he had managed to combine all the passions of the client’s wife into a minimally-painted canvas—

—but the fact that when he couldn’t use his brush to paint bright colours on anything that was supposed to convey romantic love, he had let nature do it for him. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Jaehyun’s favourite Valentine’s gift from Yuta was an incomplete rework of a painting that he had earned close to 10 thousand dollars from. Despite the original work being one of Yuta’s most successful works, it wasn’t special because it was monetarily valuable but it was particularly memorable because Yuta _hated_ it. 

He loathed it so much that when he presented the finished work to the gallery owner who had procured it, he simply wrote in the description that it was a reflection of perfectly normal everyday life of a typical young man in Brooklyn, sipping a glass of hot coffee with a laptop in front of him and the scarlet evening sun shining from the balcony. 

If he were to be honest with himself, Jaehyun was a little offended by the negative sentiment Yuta had harboured towards the painting, because it was a rare chance that he got to take some sort of credits in any Yuta work—even if all he did was unknowingly agreed to being drawn since Yuta took his picture by surprise—and he even found himself taking a vested interest in watching the painting process complete. He had expected that it would take a long time to finish this particular work because Yuta had always had troubles painting close-up watercolour portraits (he mostly specialised in oil canvas paintings) but to his surprise, it took him no time at all to complete the painting that he stared mindlessly at it for an hour or two, not really knowing if he could actually deem it completed. 

Mark, having granted himself the seniority in the art of reading Yuta’s moods, supposed that Yuta was probably incapable of dealing with the unexpectedly fast turnaround time because as a fellow deadline-dweller (Jaehyun could count with one hand the amount of times Mark managed to beat his deadlines), he could definitely attest to the fact that even if he could dream of nothing more unattainable than being able to finish a work earlier than scheduled, most of the time it only served to make him feel more anxiously happy at most and wary about early celebration. It was the kind of explanation didn’t really help much, but it did make Jaehyun feel like he could understand a little of what Yuta was feeling as he went through this awkward period of being hesitant about an achievement. 

Drawing from his own experiences, Jaehyun assumed that it was the feeling one would get if the subway arrived a minute early, or if there was no queue outside Yuta’s favourite halal food diner, or if there was no trash on the grounds of Scotia Street—after all, even if their professional lives had no overlaps, their shared space and discomfort for luxury were things that were universal for everyone in the city. Whenever Jaehyun and Mark wondered if the weirdness of the NYC-branded chaos was still something that Yuta struggled with, especially considering how orderly Japan was, Yuta only said that he didn’t feel anything particularly difficult other than some general and minor inconveniences. 

With a strange sense of loss hovering above his head, Jaehyun watched as Yuta relentlessly fixed a finished painting that didn’t need any amendments, stopping himself short from asking if he still thought the same about not being affected by the city’s general rabidity. He had always taken comfort in the way Yuta had always felt like an enigmatic exception to the accepted norm —of letting oneself be so consumed by the morbid insanity of the city that you throw yourself into the pit of frenzy in order to find a sense of belonging—that it unsettled him to see Yuta so obsessed with the newfound deviation. 

“It almost feels like he’s observing the city instead of living in it,” Mark had once said about Yuta that made John tease him about treating Yuta like his personal social experiment subject. 

It made a lot of sense in all the ways that Mark had made sense, the roundabout explanation that needed some few rounds of introspection to be able to truly get it, though this time around the logic was rather shockingly acute. Being an observer didn’t necessitate adaptation, and perhaps that really was how Yuta seemed like he never belonged to the city even if he knew it like the entire city map had been tattooed on his palm. 

Until now. 

Yuta’s agitation seemed to only intensify with the more time he spent to fix the painting and then the more colours he put on it the further it was from the original picture he took, so by the time he handed the painting over to the gallery as a completed commission and received his payment, he looked so soulless that Jaehyun and Mark didn’t know what to do except to leave him be and let him stare at a blank new canvas in silence. 

When Jaehyun woke up the next day to prepare for work, Yuta was still sitting in front of his canvas and to this day Jaehyun still regretted not checking on him because if he had, he would have noticed that he had been sobbing as he repainted the picture of Jaehyun that he had sold and would also have known that it wasn’t discomfort at the punctuality that got Yuta so distressed, but the fact that he knew he wasn’t supposed to have sold the painting. 

He returned from work and found Yuta occupying his bed because his own bed had half-painted drafts and photographs he decided not to paint sprawled on it. It wasn’t uncommon to see Yuta bunking in especially when he was desperate for some sleep in a bed that actually functioned as one, but at that time his gaunt and sunken eyes were staring directly on the ceiling and his lips were saying nothing, so Jaehyun decided that an intervention, even if delayed, was imperative. 

He took off his tie, sat leaning against his bed and took Yuta’s hand in his. He had been hoping that a wordless reassurance would do, but now he was making himself ready to listen to him. 

“I feel like a sellout,” Yuta said, with the emphasis on _sellout_ sounding like a much needed catarsis, an ablution for the muddiness inside him, even a confession of some sort. “I shouldn’t have sold it, I really shouldn't.”

“Speaking of which, I still have yet to ask for my share of the payment considering I was the model of it,” Jaehyun had joked, hoping to defuse the tension Yuta had been feeling. In spite of his best effort to understand him and his artistic endeavours, he realised that it was just an impossible task to do, because getting to know a person should be a lifelong commitment especially for someone like Yuta who would sometimes say nothing with his words but everything with his body. 

He nudged Yuta with his head but then stopped after seeing his glassy eyes and immediately rose to lie beside him and stroked his face gently until he settled down and they both ended up sleeping together for a few hours until Jaehyun jerked up and realised that he had not showered. 

It was a few seconds before he noticed that Yuta wasn’t there, but by the time he took notice of him, Yuta was already back to his little studio in the corner of the living room, frantically painting something and Jaehyun knew immediately he was trying to replicate the painting that he had sold. 

Jaehyun’s next move was by instinct—something he would later realise to be extremely important to his epiphany—and he rushed to give Yuta a tight backhug before taking a breath and whispered to tell him that he did well, he did very well, and he did amazing, so fucking amazing, and that there were no two similar pieces of the same art and please don’t be hard on himself. 

The last two phrases must have really hit Yuta hard, because the brushes and the pallette suddenly hit the floor, throwing paints all around them while Yuta sobbed uncontrollably and Jaehyun finally knew what went wrong. 

It was not just that he thought of himself as a sellout, but because he literally sold a part of his soul. It was not just that he was uneasy because he finished a work far ahead of schedule, but because he watched himself succumb to the narrative of a city culture that he vowed to be excluded from. It was not just that he was unhappy about a work, it was because by having been swallowed by the unforgiving nature of the city, he was getting closer to forfeiting his own sense of artistry. 

It was such a late realisation but a realisation nonetheless—that Yuta was such a sensitive soul that a stain in the beautiful world he thought he inhabited in could be such a plunge to him into a free fall and that Jaehyun would have to not just learn to love him as a person and an free-spirited artist but also find a way to fall for the way he perceived the world. 

He didn’t know if Yuta knew about it but Jaehyun knew it, Mark knew it and John knew it—that he was the heart of their little circle and it didn’t matter if Mark and John or Mark and Jaehyun got to know each other from bare traces of familial bonds because in the end they got together by gravitating towards Yuta and if he wasn’t happy, none of them could smile. 

And so he gave him a declaration of commitment or some sort and asked to have the incomplete work as a gift. 

“Why,” Yuta asked. “It’s horrible.” 

“It’s beautiful,” Jaehyun answered truthfully, because the painting was a reflection of Yuta’s current state of mind: an incomplete understanding of his own struggles, a budding blossoming of his own love story and Jaehyun wanted to continue being a part of it. 

He asked again, softly. “I want everything that you poured your heart in, I want it all. You can think of them as your Valentine’s gifts to me, I don’t mind.” 

This moved Yuta a little bit and he took a few moments before casting his final doubt. 

“It’s June,” he said simply and Jaehyun knew what it meant. 

“Who cares what time of the year it is,” Jaehyun answered and held on to him tighter. “14th February is my birthday, so every other day could be Valentines.”

Jaehyun could always tell if it was working whenever he attempt to reverse Yuta’s deploration of his own labours of love, because he leaned in so close that their cheeks were touching and laid a little more of his body weight into the hug and let Jaehyun sway him into comfort and so that was how Jaehyun, for the first time in his life, felt genuinely happy about being a Valentine boy. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


It was about three years after Jaehyun came over to New York that John got promoted to being his team leader and Jaehyun initially felt a little taken aback by how shocked he was by the news. 

It happened during a quick stand-up when the entire department got called in to the meeting room for this swift announcement of John replacing their current leader (who got assigned to be in the team handling a merger project in Guadalajara) and Jaehyun was hammered with the indelible truth that reactions to any kind of changes, be it organisational or societal or personal or whatever, were always the most genuine in only the first 3 seconds—and he knew it precisely because he knew that something was stopping him from immediately clapping jubilantly in a show of support for his best friend. 

He wished he was a little more prepared for it—he long suspected that he would have reacted better if John actually warned him beforehand, because what were bros for if not for moments like these—and he still feels awful about it to this day for accidentally having a transient discontent show on his face because throughout the announcement, it had been his face that John had been consistently looking out for. 

He wasn’t lying about being genuinely happy and proud for John’s promotion when he clapped and cheered after that, but John’s expression at seeing his initial shock must have dampered his ecstasy and their friendship ended up having to fall back something unexpected before they figured things out: 

Yuta’s part-time job as a bartender. 

The job at Extradited Ecstasy (John called it Double E for short) didn’t pay much and it wasn’t even a consistent gig but the bar owner was, as Jaehyun was unfortunate enough to be the last to know, Yuta’s ex-boyfriend, and just like that time when John’s promotion was announced, his initial shock after being told about this probably made Yuta a lot more uncomfortable than it should be. 

(It didn’t help that Mark secretly sort of probably maybe kind of implied that they were still occasional friends with some benefits and it was an area Jaehyun’s imagination refused to touch no matter what, especially when there used to be times when he noticed that Yuta would return from his bartending work in the morning with a glow on his face and looking unnaturally energised.) 

Regardless of the whimsical nature of Yuta’s side job, Jaehyun was glad that he happened to be on full-time gig for the winter at that time John got promoted, because their schedules just happened to clash in ways that made it extremely difficult for any meal together and for a while it had seem like John was on his way out of their little Scotia Street gang and getting closer towards the much coveted place among the most prestigious of Wall Street. John having a more mentally taxing task meant that his lunch breaks were mostly doubling up as a cigarette break while he tried to attend to less important emails on this tablet that he didn’t manage to read during normal working hours and more deliverables meant that he would have to forgo dinner and only take bite-sized snacks until late at night when there would be nothing else but roadside kebabs available. 

Mark was away at that time for a story about oil pipeline debate in Alberta, Canada so Jaehyun really found himself in a tight spot by the time he bumped into John in the elevator a few weeks after his new role came into effect and had nothing to talk to him about other than the weather. He couldn’t even bring himself to open his mouth to tell him that Double E was having a promotion throughout December with free pints for every beer tower that he would definitely like before the elevator stopped at the floor before theirs and the Corporate Accounting Leader came in and started talking to John about a ledger misalignment that he was hoping John could help to plan on mitigating from the upstream. 

It was, in Jaehyun’s memory, the most awkward few weeks for him because not only that he was mostly spending his time alone at Double E and having his thoughts involuntarily circling around the fear of the disintegration of his friendship with John, but also because frequenting the bar more granted him a free but unwanted front row view of the development of the possible romantic reconciliation of Yuta and his bar owner ex-boyfriend. 

Worst of all—the said bar owner ex-boyfriend was actually really hot as hell. 

Noah was conventionally attractive in ways most white boys were conventionally attractive, deeply piercing pair of beautiful blue eyes and sky high cheekbones and gorgeously lush golden hair, but it was the way he looked at Yuta that convinced Jaehyun that they must had some of the greatest sex in the world, because there was just no mistaken that look of reciprocation that Yuta sometimes shot him with. 

While Jaehyun was mulling all of that, Yuta had seemed blissfully oblivious in ways that Jaehyun really didn’t appreciate at all and it only took him one sighting of Yuta and Noah kissing before they disappeared into a staff room next to the washroom for him to decide that he had enough of everything and stormed back home, free beers be damned and then ended up not speaking to all of them for a week: not to Mark because he wasn’t around, not to Yuta because he didn’t want to reveal to him that he had been taking an unwelcome interest into his sex life, and definitely not to John because he was so far above his reach now. 

Yuta was the one who spoke to him first, knocking on his door when he was trying to play the new Frank Ocean song on his guitar to tell him that John had started coming to Double E on weekday nights and did something happen in the office and Jaehyun only shrugged before nonchalantly saying that he didn’t know anything. 

Then he started hearing about John turning his lunch breaks into lunch naps and seeing him losing an alarming amount of weight and thought that he really needed to ask Yuta if John said anything to him at Double E, something that put a mischievous but slightly exasperated grin on Yuta’s face. 

“You could come over and ask him in person,” he said, “I feel like he’s going to be there tonight since it’s Friday.” 

Jaehyun’s apprehension must have formed creases on his forehead because Yuta rolled his eyes at him. 

“You see, I’m not the one whom he needs to talk to right now,” he admonished with the kind of sterness that Jaehyun had never seen him use before. 

So Jaehyun begrudgingly kicked his petty jealousy of Noah away and reluctantly dragged himself to Double E about two weeks before Christmas and true enough, John was there, looking absolutely horrible even as a wasted person and Jaehyun finally stopped giving in to his ego and apologised to John for having been a complete arse about this important career milestone of his and ignored all the telltale signs of his struggles in coping with his new role. Noah, proving himself to be a good sport, chimed in by declaring that their drinks that night would be on the house and so with all restraints removed (it was a Friday night after all), they drank to their repaired bro-ship until way past Double E’s closing time. 

At the heels of the cab that they got to take John home, Yuta made a clarification to him tipsily—and showing him that he wasn’t _that_ oblivious—that yes, his eyes weren’t wrong, he had been fucking Noah quite frequently these days. 

“That’s none of my business,” Jaehyun said, fumbling a little because he had had too much to drink, except not quite. It wasn’t the kind of thing his barely-functioning mind could process at all and he wanted nothing but to go back to Scotia Street as soon as possible, collapse on to his bed, deal with the hangover later and forget that Yuta ever confided in him about such intimate details of his life. At that moment, the last thing he really needed to hear was anything about who Yuta had been fucking and who he wanted to fuck. 

Yuta, who clearly shouldn’t have drank more than one pint of beer, continued on as they returned back to the sidewalk and started their journey back to their apartment. “Yes it is. I want it to be your business.” 

“I get it though, he’s hot and sexy and very fuckable,” Jaehyun replied crassly, in an attempt to shut down the topic as quickly as possible. _And very nice too, goddammit._

“I mean,” Yuta said, obviously having none of Jaehyun’s disinterest, insisted for his attention by tugging at his shirt and ended up pulling them both in an accidental embrace, “I thought of you when he fucked me, this can’t be right.” 

It would be years before Yuta would remember this particular incident and Jaehyun didn’t have the heart to tell him that he remembered everything he said that night: from the fact that he only got back together with Noah out of confusion because Jaehyun staying with him in the same house had been making him think of indecent things for a while and that Noah was the most available out of his many exes; to the fact that he had cried when he told Noah that he lost that spark he once had for him and no matter how many times they got back together it just wouldn’t feel the same again; to the fact that he didn’t think Jaehyun would ever think of him that way, at most probably as a one-night-stand or a short fling, because Jaehyun was one of those Wall Street corporate whores who came to New York to chase for money and would definitely end up so disillusioned with all the New York things that he would later run back to Massachusetts and marry a good, family-approved Asian girl; and finally, to the fact that his mind hadn’t known a day of peace since the day he opened the door and Jaehyun’s—according to Yuta—sexy ass walked in and more than anything, he really really _really_ wanted to know if someone like Jaehyun would find the idea of being together with someone like Yuta repulsive. 

It would be another year plus a few days before Jaehyun gave Yuta the answers to all the questions Yuta didn’t remember asking by giving him a kiss so passionate the world felt like it stopped working around them on this very same spot, on Christmas eve with snow falling on them and the streetlights flashing on top of them, but at that moment when he had caught Yuta crying in a fit of drunkenness and pouring out his soul to him, he decided that he would now give in to the condition that had been causing his stomach to fail whenever Yuta did whatever. 

Because after all, once the shock wore off 3 seconds later and it sunk in to him that Yuta had just confessed his feelings for him, he realised that the stars were all aligned for all of them to meet for this particular purpose, that somehow being scantily related to Mark got him to move to New York and staying with him got him to know Yuta, then Mark being scantily related to John got him and all his and Jaehyun’s work problems engulfed into some sort of conflict within their tiny little circle and if it wasn’t because Jaehyun had been an asshole about John being promoted and if it also wasn’t because Jaehyun had been a petty little bitch about Yuta’s ex-boyfriend—

—he wouldn’t have known that Yuta had been in love with him from the very first sight. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


St Patrick’s Day hardly meant anything for Jaehyun except giving him a day of alleviation from the unrelenting pace of work (funnily enough, he had always thought, nobody seemed to know how to prepare for backups until it was time for them to take a holiday) but on the eighth year after he came to New York, he, along with his two housemates, took advantage of the holiday to finish moving all their belongings from Scotia Street to a brighter-looking apartment a few blocks away at Angela Avenue. 

They were all done by lunch but Mark still needed to pack some of his older writings that he did while in college into a box and Jaehyun took advantage of the extended time Mark required (to perhaps, Jaehyun guessed, _cringe_ at his more amateurish works which was an activity John had dubbed as his “passage of rites into senior journalism”) to take a break on the sofa they decided to leave in the apartment for the next occupant and stare at the ceiling of the place whose emptiness was now a stranger to him. 

Jaehyun had a feeling that they wouldn’t have needed to move if it wasn’t because of the reality that they had collectively hoarded more junks than what the tiny little place in Scotia Street could hold and inevitably shrank the size of Yuta’s studio space in the living room. It was one of the hardest decisions for them too, especially when they were so picky about their choice of a new apartment that their agent who went by the name of Doyoung Kim almost gave up on helping them to find a new place. It was yet again John who saved the day when his vast professional connections got them introduced to a Japanese colleague over from Internal Audit who was ending his assignment and moving back to Tokyo and was more than happy to know that a fellow countryman would be one of the new occupants of their beloved place and happily left some furniture intact. 

Yuta came to sit leaning against the sofa in front of his shoulder and took his arm to wrap himself with it. Jaehyun loved it whenever he did this thing to try and fit himself into his body, because it always felt like he was instinctively trying to make him feel complete and whole. 

“What are you thinking about,” Yuta asked. 

“A little bit of this,” Jaehyun answered, “and a little bit of that. It’s been 8 years after all.” He then moved his thumb to Yuta’s face and traced along his eyebrows and cheeks to dwell in the fact that this beautiful face had been the thing he saw when he had opened the door to this apartment for the very first time. 

“I don’t even remember how long I have been staying here,” Yuta said. “But I know that it’s going to be weird to start drawing from the new place since it’s so clean and tidy.” 

Putting aside the fact that Yuta was the most reluctant among them to move despite the necessity, Jaehyun was now reminded of the many times Mark had occasionally jokingly bemoaned about the way Yuta’s mind worked at the whims of a cotton candy, because sometimes it was like information just went into his mind and dissolved without leaving any tangible trace in ways similar to him just spilling out sauces outside the plate during meals and rendering them basically useless. He had lost count of all the times they went through birthdays without him realising that it was a birthday or misremembering how long had they been in Scotia Street or when did his first meeting with Mark happened (“You had that date immortalised as part of your portfolio,” John rebuked him, reminding Mark that he had an upper hand) or when did they start moving in together. Over the years Jaehyun (and John too, pretty much) had grown accustomed to watching these two kinds of artistic personalities clash: the loud, chaotically unstructured grandiloquence of Mark’s mind with the bewitchingly abstract desolation of Yuta’s vision, and nothing had made it easier for him to understand Yuta other than watching him gradually but silently accommodate Mark in ways that allowed him to keep his talking points yet still easing other aspects of their shared lives. 

Jaehyun didn’t think that even Mark realised it, because if he had, he would have noticed that Yuta would be able to tell things about Mark that he was afraid to confront, like if he was about to write in defense of a perspective he didn’t support, or if he had been disturbed by topic he had been researching, or if he felt overwhelmed by the massiveness of all the man-made calamities around the world. It was also in this manner that Jaehyun was able to slowly understand the beauty of their platonicness, because they were both similarly astute minds that fed off each other’s strength—Mark was verbose in ways where Yuta was vivid—and also because the balance was so crucial for them that they just wouldn’t be able to breach the status quo no matter what. 

Those and also perhaps because when Yuta inevitably started falling in love with a lot of other people who weren’t Mark, he was also starting to learn using the strength of his own mind to freely desire and Jaehyun knew this precisely because he was one of the ones Yuta had directed the force of his longings at. 

Yuta squeezed his hand as he tilted his head to look at him fondly. 

“Were you disappointed when you first arrived,” he asked and Jaehyun’s mind was immediately hit by that phantom pain in his toes caused by the falling luggage. 

“You know,” Jaehyun answered, “I still want to know how the fuck did you not find me embarrassing.” 

“I don’t know,” Yuta said, grinning sheepishly. “I just know that I spent way too much time wishing I wasn’t the one who opened the door.”

“And what would have happened if you didn’t? We still live in the same house, so we were bound to meet in some ways.” 

Hearing that, Yuta climbed up to the sofa and flopped on Jaehyun before teasing him by kissing his collarbone and taunting him so much that he let out a groan. 

“Can you imagine,” Yuta said, taking Jaehyun’s hands to his back and nudging him into grabbing his butt, “if your after-shower body was the first thing I saw.” 

“That’s so bold of you to say, considering you refused to talk to me for months at the first sight of my face,” Jaehyun teased him back and kissed his nose. 

“At least I made the first move to talk to you—”

“Yeah, on my birthday,” Jaehyun scoffed. 

“And then I kept hinting about wanting to date you—”

“Yeah but you were fucking other people.”

“Also because John was talking about you going on lunch dates with some girl.” 

“Shit,” Jaehyun gasped lightly, “I forgot about that.” 

“And you didn’t seem to care.” 

“About?”

Yuta turned a little red and buried his face into his chest. 

“That I was. Well.”

“Oh, I cared,” Jaehyun said as he gathered his entire body’s strength to hoist Yuta upwards and topple him over so that he was now under him. “I cared so much that I remember all their names.”

“Oh yeah?” Yuta challenged him. 

“Oh yeah,” Jaehyun said, kissing Yuta’s wrist while pinning his other hand to the armrest, “first, of course there was Noah, because I saw the way he looked at you.”

If this was a few years back, Yuta would have squirmed so hard that he would retract himself and retreat backwards, but now that he elected to indulge in Jaehyun’s petty jealousy for his own amusement, he opened his legs wider to let Jaehyun’s hips fall between them. 

“Go on, tell me more.” 

“And before that there was this guy from art school named Mateo.”

“That was just one time.” 

“I know,” Jaehyun said and straddled him. “And then after Noah there was Arthur—”

“I didn’t fuck Art.” 

“But you kissed him.” 

“Doesn’t count.” 

“Oh yeah it counts,” Jaehyun laughed. 

“I can’t stand you.”

“And then there was Jon. Without the H,” Jaehyun said, to differentiate one of Yuta’s former lovers from their best friend. “And then there was—”

“And then there was you.” 

Jaehyun took a deep breath and repeated. “And then there was me.” 

Yuta too, took a deep breath before letting his hand touch Jaehyun’s cheeks and his knuckles trace along his jawline. 

“And then there was _only_ you.” 

They were lost in each other's eyes for a while before Jaehyun noticed that their chests were pressed so tight against each other that Yuta’s racing heartbeats caused a stir in his veins. 

Jaehyun bent down to break the eye contact, making Yuta gasp for a while as he received the kiss and then Jaehyun whispered in a low voice into his ear. 

“Are you still nervous?”

Yuta’s hand went to hold his neck and he closed his eyes as Jaehyun breathed into his neck. 

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “But I think I got used to it.” 

“Got used to me?”

“Got used to being nervous around you.” 

“That’s not good,” Jaehyun nuzzled him. “You shouldn’t be.” 

“I want to,” Yuta said. “I like being nervous around you, because you know, it means I still find you sexy.” 

Before Jaehyun could process what he just heard, Mark let out an exaggeratedly loud, phony cough to let them know he was there and that he was done packing his stuff and they should really get going to their new place in Angela Avenue and Yuta was so embarrassed that he giggled loudly before breaking away from Jaehyun and the both of them left Jaehyun with just a tiny bit of time to reflect on all the things that this old, creaky house had seen of him and Yuta: 

The first time they met; then all the accidental words they exchanged before they formally spoke to each other; then the first time they had a proper conversation; then all the times he found himself dreaming about Yuta and waking up with a wet spot between his pants (did Yuta perhaps have the same experience, he never asked); then all the times he saw him crying about Noah in Mark’s arms and all the times he too tried to offer some comfort (that Yuta had firmly rejected) as well; then all the times they kissed and fell into bed together, all the times they looked at each other and wondered if they made a mistake, all the times he swore to himself to not touch Yuta again only to have his resolves melt at the sight of his waiting lips; all the times Yuta insisted that all the kisses they had before that Christmas eve kiss were all pre-kisses and they shouldn’t be considered in to the grand scheme of things because Yuta refused to remember that there was a time when they were together in a decisively not romantic way; all the times Jaehyun tried convincing Yuta that he had no regrets about the way they had started and everyday they spent together gave them a new chance to expand their preferred narrative and finally; all the times Yuta had stolen his breath only to have Jaehyun giving them willingly and that he used to sometimes think that this little house might see them attempt loving each other until they could find nothing else to love and yet their attempts had now outlived their stay in this house and Jaehyun was now more than convinced that it was all because Yuta decided that it would. 

After all, Yuta was the one who had decided that he was sexy when they first met, Yuta was the one who decided that he would want to have Jaehyun kiss him, Yuta was the one who had decided that what their first real kiss was, Yuta was the one who had decided just now that he was still sexy and more than anything Jaehyun had fallen for the imaginary canvas that Yuta had painted for them. 

At the end of the day, loving an artist like Yuta was all about falling for the way he perceived the world and Jaehyun decided that Yuta had the most beautiful vision he had ever seen coming out from a mind. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


(iii)

  
  
  
  
  


A vinyl record of Frank Ocean and now, a leather sofa. 

Your room looks a little empty, Yuta says, and I thought it looked cool. 

Jaehyun takes a wide-legged seat and bounces on the new furniture in his room in Angela Avenue. 

It’s going to make sounds, he says cheekily. 

Yuta’s face takes the colour of a tomato when he realises what Jaehyun is talking about. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Mark, as Jaehyun would later learn, was a terrible choice of a movie mate. 

He would either be overly critical of the plots—the worst thing about being housemates with two people who were established specialised artists was the way they deem judgements an absolutely necessary element of enjoyment and so Jaehyun would also later learn to never take Mark to plays or movies or Broadway shows and never take Yuta to art galleries or exhibitions—or straight up dozed through the entire show and Jaehyun would be left with either his own thoughts or Mark’s endless diatribe after. He did sometimes enjoy arguing with Mark about the execution of some scenes in the movies—the only movie they both ended up not entirely debating about was that one movie called A Star Is Born starring Lady Gaga because it left them both speechless and not in a good way—but overall he would really rather be mindlessly enjoying art in every form as a way to destress than to add more pressure for his brain to function outside office hours. 

He supposed this was what it really meant to have passion incorporated into your income source and Jaehyun couldn’t imagine how life would mean to put a monetary value into things he loved doing. Yuta once mentioned that he would have a hard time being in corporate life too, because he wouldn’t be able to tear his mind away from art and wouldn’t be able to focus long enough to concentrate on all the jargons and terms and presentations and whatnot and Jaehyun decided that this was likely one of those “the grass is greener on the other end” cases debates they would have no conclusions for. 

“The bartending job was sometimes hard enough,” he said when they were hanging out in the balcony after Jaehyun and Mark came back from watching Crazy Rich Asians. Yuta wasn’t into movies much unless they were special Japanese screenings and Jaehyun suspected that he only watched them because of homesickness. “Did you know that I conceived that idea of the lavender girl painting while watching a limited time pole dance performance while concocting a drink for a lovely lady?”

“What,” Jaehyun chuckled at the revelation, because he had been one of those in the audience who had appreciated the performance, though mostly it was out of the appreciation for the performer's muscular prowess. “Wouldn’t it be insulting to her?”

Yuta took the cigarette from between Jaehyun’s fingers and started huffing into it. “I did tell her later when Noah got her back for another gig, but she only laughed and said she felt flattered from having a painting inspired by her performance.” 

“And did you show her the finished work?” Jaehyun said as he waited for Yuta to be done with his whiff before picking the cigarette back. Some time ago this simple action would have driven Yuta into embarrassment because of the implied indirect kiss, but now he seemed to take pleasure in making Jaehyun share everything his lips touched. 

Yuta dropped his head on his arm so that his glinting eyes could reflect the light from the streetlamps. “What do you think.” 

“I’m going to guess that she bought it,” Jaehyun answered, but he must have gotten it wrong because Yuta scrunched up his face and made such an adorable expression that he could have sworn he saw whiskers appearing on his cheeks. 

“Close, but not quite,” he said. “One of Noah’s investors bought it.” 

Similar to the way Yuta couldn’t understand the mental comparmentalisation required for Jaehyun’s corporate career, Jaehyun didn’t quite comprehend the interconnectedness of Yuta’s life either. There were times when this became such a thing that fascinated him that he stared at the static screen while writing a project proposal imagining if his co-workers were connected in ways people who Yuta worked with were connected and apparently he looked so zoned out that John tapped on his desk asking if he broke up with Yuta. 

He laughed it off (but later told him that he was far from going to be breaking up with Yuta and asked if he would like to know some details) but John being a helpful distraction made him realise that in a little circle like theirs with, statistically speaking, half of them making professions from their passions (he could only speak for himself, but he doubted that John was ever passionate about stock trading the way Mark was passionate about evolution of Asian American art across generations of immigration) and half of them being intimately involved with each other, it was like they had the makings of the kind of movies Mark would have a blast dissecting.

On the subway home, Jaehyun had his mind occupied with Mark’s point of view around that time after John got promoted (and Yuta spilled out his heart in a drunken frenzy, but Mark didn’t know about that) as he took notice of his beloved housemate’s increasingly insuppressible yearning while repeatedly berating himself for cutting things off with Noah, the closest at that time to being his one true love, after falling into the trap of rebounding with a body familiar with the shape of his. Jaehyun remembered his point of view clearly, because he recalled having to turn his head away whenever Mark had to hold him and talk him out of it, immediately understanding that a person like him who made a living from an ecosystem that required setting aside emotions in favour of capitalism wouldn’t be able to provide much comfort for an artist whose experiences in emotions were necessarily exacerbated for the sake of the art (also in favour of capitalism even if they would rather die than to acknowledge it, Jaehyun thought as he mentally pinned a talking point to be used against Mark in a possible future instance). 

He imagined that Mark would probably be openly supportive of Yuta’s healing process even though he would definitely be opposed to (at that time) his choice of healing partner: 

Jaehyun. 

A lot of things that happened after that would be accidents, but Jaehyun was sure that the first time Yuta slipped himself into his arms in the balcony was a carefully deliberated move because it took place after Jaehyun repeatedly told him that he would help in all the ways Yuta would like and all he needed to do was just to ask—which was exactly what Yuta did with his body and his lips and his hands and he was so nervous about it too, because he was trembling so hard that Jaehyun had to massage his back to calm his nerves and tell him that it was ok, everything was ok and debated internally whether to tell him that he knew that Yuta had a crush on him but in the end decided against it because Yuta had wanted an outlet for his pent-up sexual frustrations and not an inlet to confuse himself with more information. Yuta was so terrified and so anxious that they ended up kissing so messily and touched each other wrongly and he even infected Jaehyun with how nervous he was because when Yuta unbuckled his belt and tugged at his pants, he blurted out that he hadn’t done it for a while and he ran out of condoms and Yuta then stopped and fastened his belt then apologised profusely for using him that way and went back to painting but not before letting Jaehyun’s breath linger on him for just a little longer. 

If that part of their shared lives didn’t end with that Christmas eve kiss outside Double E, their story would be a cautionary tale of an impulsive sexual exploration ruining precious friendships—but it didn’t because eventually after Jaehyun made it clear to Yuta that he would like a chance to reciprocate and see how far they could take this, John told him that he was glad that Yuta had finally chosen a good (in a mostly Asian kind of definition) man to fall for and Mark started establishing a system that would make his schedules more transparent because he didn’t want to think about having possibly be around when they were doing stuff (he actually did, a few times, but Jaehyun decided that he would keep this plot point revelation for another time) and refused to put himself in situations where it might be possible in future for him to see things he didn’t want to see. 

For their kind of story, Jaehyun concluded as he reached their new place in Angela Avenue and found Yuta smiling as he announced that takeout would be arriving in a few minutes, Mark would still be a terrible movie mate but Jaehyun felt like he wouldn’t mind listening to his commentaries somewhat. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


The apartment in Angela Avenue was a little too huge and expensive (Jaehyun didn’t mind it much, because when he got promoted as well some time after John, he got some healthy fattening of his paycheck), so when John stretched his hands up and casually announced his intention to move in with them when they were having Korean BBQ in Queens, it was met with an eruption of questions from both Mark and Yuta. 

“Dude,” Mark’s question was laced with confused exasperation, “you live here in Queens, why would you want to move in with us.” 

“It’s not even close to your office, why did you bother,” Yuta asked, equally perplexed. 

“Chill,” John stood up to sign that he was going to explain. It was a gesture that would never fail in forcing Mark and Yuta to pay attention to him because his gigantic height made dwarves out of them and it was intimidating as hell sometimes. 

Jaehyun didn’t say much because it wasn’t a surprise to him and he had heard John complaining about his housemate and his housemate’s girlfriend and their deafening sessions of experimental lovemaking (“Try making a presentation about the impact of Artificial Intelligence in the efficiency and efficacy of corporate auditing processes and then hearing Janice fucking Chris with a strap-on,” John once explained about his eyebags during a cigarette break) and so, chose to not ask him about whether he minded that two of his potential future housemates would need to spend their time in that way with each quite a lot. He would like to think that Mark had told him about it, the fact that despite his careful and transparent scheduling, it didn’t stop him from seeing the stolen kisses and the overt flirtations and feeling like an intruder and the only explanation he could really put some logic in was that John was actually making use of his frustrations with his housemates for an excuse to move in with them so that he could be fellow intruders with Mark and for that, Jaehyun didn’t think he could appreciate him more. 

With John moving in, they managed to keep their budgets in check while being able to live a little more comfortably and eventually after an initial period of creative stump, Yuta was able to start painting again—and it was because of a news that he got from Japan. 

“Haruna has a daughter now!” he announced one day when Jaehyun returned with takeout sushi that Yuta had requested. Jaehyun let Yuta chatter away throughout dinner about all the growth milestones of his other nephews and nieces and his plans for this new niece as well and Jaehyun had always loved the way Yuta was especially fond of his nieces but it also made him a little queasy at the thought of children, because despite having dreamt about being a father in his early 20s, he was nowhere close to achieving career or relationship stability that would provide him with the luxury to desire a family of his own. 

Watching Yuta’s excitement over his new niece had brought a new wave of baby fever back to both of them, because a daily dose of little Naomi-chan had been instrumental in injecting life back into his art and his fresh outputs of brightly-painted canvases proved to be a hit and he would later have to put a cap on his commissions because, according to him, there was only one of him and one of Jaehyun and if he didn’t get enough of Jaehyun then he would rather have none of him—pretty bollocks of a logic that Jaehyun was inescapably fond of. 

Yet, at the back of his mind, he knew that Yuta would need to know something, so he took a chance and sat leaning against the glass window in the living room while Yuta was painting and told him that yes, he would be open to baby talks if Yuta wanted to. 

It was something that came afters days and nights of research and calculation and re-calculation, because he was now proud to announce that he had crunched the numbers and came out with the conclusion that they could afford to start looking for a surrogate in about two years time if they could maintain their current monthly budget with the assumption that the economy wouldn’t crash like it did in 2008 and that Jaehyun didn’t get himself fired or laid off and he didn’t take into account the fluctuations in Yuta’s incomes because he didn’t want him to consider going back to bartending just to be able to afford having a child at home. In about two years, he promised with 99% confidence level, they would be able to provide a healthy environment for a child with two real dads and two extra dads (he hadn’t asked John and Mark if they would be ok with a kid at home but he assumed that they would). It would be weird for a baby girl to grow up in a house with 4 stinky men but they would find a way, he said. 

Yuta’s initial reaction was exactly what he had expected, eyes growing increasingly larger with each words as Jaehyun elaborated his proposed plan but what followed next was something that Jaehyun didn’t factor in because Yuta carefully put down all his tools and shifted over to sit as close to him as possible and curled into his body as he slowly started sobbing and Jaehyun was so startled that he didn’t react until there were tears on his shoulder and that was when his chest fell to the ground because how could he had forgotten that he had once learned that it was not a good idea to ambush Yuta with his plans, especially one as big and decisive as this. 

As an apology, he let Yuta melt into his body as he tried to again get into his mind and make sense of the world from his point of view and realised that everything that had been happening was all because they were two grown ups in the kind of reality that had been brutal towards their innocent dreams—falling in lust before falling in love, threading around the limits of exclusiveness because being able to make commitments was a form of luxury and now, so fearful of an unprotected future that mere mentions of it drove Yuta to tears. 

That was exactly two years ago and now they sit in the same spot, looking at each other and Jaehyun finally realises that Yuta hadn’t really broken down because of a myriad of fears, but because he didn’t get to be the one to say it. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Jaehyun couldn’t confirm it until later, but he was guessing that Hyde was playing in Yuta’s room when he had knocked on his door and shoved a packet of condom into his hands and said that he usually left the music at highest volume if he wanted Mark to know that he was fucking someone in his room and so if Jaehyun was in the mood, could he please. 

“So that’s why—” Yuta didn’t leave much room for Jaehyun to think of all the other times when this had happened in the past because he dragged him across the hallway to his room and slammed it shut, then kissed him voraciously and the music was so loud in ways that Jaehyun knew must be intentional, because the loudness messed him up so much that he didn’t realise that the hungry, wet kisses would make their pants drop to the floor and would guide his lubricated fingers into Yuta’s back and then he would get so hard that he couldn’t even control the speed of his own thrusts and by the time he groaned as he released, he wanted to hide away forever because for someone with Yuta’s sensuality, this must had been the worst sex ever. 

If Yuta had minded the way they did it the first time, he sure didn’t show it at all, because having Mark around didn’t stop them from reaching out to each other for a quick one before Jaehyun would leave for work, a slow one when Mark would be away travelling for work, a painful one when Jaehyun would hoist him up against the wall and fuck him so hard that his paint-stained palm left a hand-shaped mark on it, a clingy one where Yuta wanted it after coming back from Double E because he had kissed Noah that day and came so close to fucking him and then most memorably, an awkward one where they had to stop halfway because they were doing in Jaehyun’s room and Mark had came knocking and asked if Jaehyun was ok because Yuta had forgotten to leave the music on and he was wondering if Jaehyun knew where he was. 

There were times where Jaehyun had felt that he should really have told Yuta that he knew about Yuta’s feelings, because it was hard to tell him that from the very first time they kissed, they were actually doing it out of attraction for each other and that there was never a time when he had felt any casualness in the way they had touched each other but this was an epiphany that came a little too late, because Yuta was again crying after he came and Jaehyun bent down to kiss him and he mumbled about subjecting Jaehyun to all of the things he shouldn’t have done and then when Jaehyun kissed him again to tell him that he didn’t mind it, he didn’t mind everything, it was ok for Yuta to want this from him, it was ok for Yuta to need that from him, because he said it, didn’t he. 

“You needed something new so that you wouldn’t fall into familiar arms,” Jaehyun said to Yuta, reminding him of the way he had made his request, intending to brush away all guilt only for Yuta to grab on to him tightly as he made another confession. 

“I lied,” he said. “I fucking lied to you.” 

And that was how Jaehyun got to know that Yuta hadn’t meant for his infatuation to grow deeper and that the more frequent they got together, the more tortured he had felt because the thought of having Jaehyun torn away from him became a plausibility that felt like some form of excruciating despair and so he told Jaehyun to fuck him one last time and that would be it. 

They didn’t speak for a month because Jaehyun wouldn’t do it and it wasn’t until Christmas eve when the weather forecast said that it would be snowing that day that Jaehyun remembered a painting of Meiji-era maiden in the snow that Yuta was doing and rushed over to Double E and waited for Yuta to finish his work then made his own confession and waited for the snow to fall on them before properly kissing him. 

In the background, some toyshop jingles provided the perfect background music as he held on to Yuta’s cold hands and told him that he was sorry for not picking up the courage to tell him that he had adored him in ways Yuta had wanted him to because he was too busy caring about whether he still harboured leftover feelings for Noah; he was happy that Yuta came to him because he wouldn’t have had the guts to kiss him otherwise; he had been thinking about a lot of things ever since he opened the door to their little apartment in Scotia Street and his beautiful face greeted him; he didn’t know if Yuta would even like him that way because he didn’t think he was the kind of artistic soul that he would find any sort of connection with; he didn’t really want to be with any girl because he had had a crush on Yuta for the longest time and his mind hadn’t known a day of peace ever since Hyde was playing in the background when they had first fucked. 

It wasn’t, of course, word-for-word regurgitation of the confession Yuta made drunkenly the year before, but it was good enough for Yuta that he accepted it and kissed him back, then later sealed it with the loveliest thing Jaehyun had ever heard in this life. 

He waited for the snow to get a little heavier and hung on to him before whispering into his ear. 

“I think I now know why I took so long to start wanting you.” 

Jaehyun tightened his hug as he anticipated the answer to the riddle. 

“Because you used to exist only in my dreams.” 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


Yuta didn’t give an answer to whether or not he would agree to Jaehyun’s proposal of giving each other two years of buffer time before starting to look out for surrogates, but he started giving Jaehyun things with an intention to want to enjoy them together. 

First of all was this limited edition vinyl record of Frank Ocean that Yuta said he got from a client in Double E who worked for a record label in Los Angeles with a note saying that it would look great on a shelf he had laid his eyes on while shopping at Ikea. 

Then there was the leather sofa, because he started thinking of the kind of place they would occupy together even if they would have to share it with John and Mark somewhat, the way they probably would have to share their little future baby girl with the both of them as well. 

And then after that there was a vintage car plate, because we are living an American dream and what better way to live than to have roadtrips in a vintage Bentley convertible that they could drive across the country, from New York to New Jersey to Detroit to Chicago (and visit John’s parents if they could) to Minneapolis then to both North and South Dakota to Wyoming and Montana and Seattle (and if possible, hop over across the borders to visit Mark’s family over in Vancouver) to Las Vegas and Los Angeles and San Diego to El Paso to Houston to New Orleans and then to Florida to lastly Washington DC before going back to New York. 

Then there was this instant camera that he bought for himself, because Yuta said that Jaehyun was so beautiful that only candid pictures would do him justice. 

He also started sometimes doodling designs on sheets of papers and even though he refused to tell Jaehyun what they were for, John and Mark had slapped their own foreheads in disbelief because oh my god, how could you not know, they exclaimed. It took a long while before Jaehyun noticed it and by the time he saw the signs—studying accessories, staring outside jewellery shops, fiddling with his fingers—he too, felt like he should be bludgeoned for missing an a big piece of epiphany in the entire aspect of Yuta’s vision. 

It wasn’t easy, but Yuta’s art had so much of his soul in it that it was easy to slip into his mind and see the world from his eyes and so Jaehyun took his hand and stare into his large, beautiful eyes and see the way their story had formed in that wonderfully imaginative mind, their future and all the necessary bumps in the road before all their stars would perfectly align: when they wouldn’t talk in the first few months so they would only use the best kinds of words with each other; when they couldn’t start loving properly until they pre-kissed and pre-fucked until they got rid of all the baggages and were finally ready for a lifetime of devotion; when they stumbled in reaching an agreement on how to build a family together so they would have to take years studying each other to know for sure that they could prepare a foundation of health and happiness for all the little lives they would bring to the world and Jaehyun had now decided that in a toss between the reality in his head and the dream in Yuta’s mind, he could use a lot more of Yuta’s dream and that the world could really benefit with a lot more Yutas, maybe a tiny one that resembled him taking care another tiny one that resembled Jaehyun and so he turned off the lights and let the room be illuminated by only the candle light and told him softly: 

Whenever you’re ready. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


(iv)

  
  
  
  
  


And so Jaehyun tells Yuta that it didn’t hit him like a big, tidal wave too when the epiphany struck—because he has been waiting for this moment for the past ten years or so, from the moment he first saw him, from the moment he first talked to him in the balcony, from the moment he first kissed him also in the balcony, from the first time he heard of Hyde’s music, from that time he kissed him properly, from that time he told Yuta that maybe, just maybe, we could think about having a little one or two around us. 

He doesn’t believe in fate, doesn’t believe in destiny, doesn’t believe in God—but somehow there must be a reason why they, John and Mark and Jaehyun and Yuta, have met together by means of all the most scant of relations and now that the four of them have been so together that their lives were married and despite all of that Jaehyun wants the different kind of marriedness with Yuta and now that Yuta wants it too, he lets Yuta have his left hand so that he could start drawing on his ring finger. 

  
  
  
  
  


*

  
  
  
  
  


A vinyl record of Frank Ocean, a leather sofa, a vintage car plate, and now, a polaroid of Jaehyun and his fiance Yuta, showing off their ring fingers—a limited edition Cartier diamond on Yuta’s and a one-and-only special version of a hand-drawn ring on Jaehyun’s—with a caption written underneath: 

_you used to exist only in my dreams_

  
  
  
  
  


*

**Author's Note:**

> \- thank you so much for reading and now that you've finished this please let me revel in the fact that it really is a happy fic and i lied not  
> \- also, thank you so much for reading this because this is actually the happiest i've been after finished writing a fic not because it's a happy piece but also because i think i wrote kinda sorta well 
> 
> \- please stay safe, you, because we are still in a pandemic and we still have so many issues around the world and take care!!


End file.
